Wanting Sheila Dead (43 page)

“I think it's annoying how long all this takes,” Bennis said. “And Bobby's no help. Not that he ever was any help to anybody, but you know what I mean. He doesn't know anything, and he wouldn't tell me anything if he did know. And then all he wants to do is wail about whether all this brought down the resale value of the house. I told him
that if he wanted to sell the house, I'd buy it from him at any price he named, but he didn't go there. He doesn't really want to sell it.”

“Do you really want to buy it?” Gregor asked. “Just a couple of weeks ago, you were refusing to set foot in the place.”

“I don't want it to go out of the family,” Bennis said vaguely. She wasn't making any sense, and she knew it. She was only making sense to herself. She looked over a few more of the pictures, the ones with the girls in them. “What's the name of the one you said she was convinced was a spy for Fox News?”

“Grace something,” Gregor said. “Harrigan, I think, but that wasn't the name she was using. I mean Harrigan wasn't the name she was using. She was still calling herself Grace.”

“There isn't any Grace here,” Bennis said. “I know which one I'd pick if I was a judge. Just from these photographs. The rest of them just sort of fade into the background, but this one pops right out. Who's this?”

Gregor looked over. “Ivy Demaris. Demari. Something like that.”

“I like the name Ivy. What was she like? Was she a bitch?”

“I really don't know,” Gregor said. “How could I know? I didn't spend that much time there.”

“You know their names.”

“Yes, well. I would have to, wouldn't I?”

“You recognized the face,” Bennis said. “Ivy's face. And it's Demari. They've got the names of the girls in the second section here. I wonder what she really did in that airport.”

“Besides assault a skycap?”

“But there must have been a reason, don't you think? Even Sheila Dunham has to have reasons.”

“In my experience, most of her reasons come down to figuring out what's going to get her the most publicity. You'd think she'd have had enough of publicity after the last couple of months.”

“Oh, no,” Bennis said. “There's no such thing as enough publicity.”

Then she found it. She leaned much closer to the paper, and half lifted it up in one hand. She gave a passing thought to the possibility
that she was going to end up needing glasses. The explanatory paragraph was right there at the end of the first section, so that, skimming, she had almost missed it.

“Listen,” she said. “ ‘The altercation arose after Ms. Dunham became convinced that the baggage handlers had dropped her two leather suitcases deliberately.' What do you think that means? Do you think she saw them throw them on the ground?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“No,” Bennis said, “but I bet she thought she did. It's the kind of thing she would think. I wonder if they'll have video of this on one of the cable news stations. Fox will have it, I bet. Fox loves to trash her. Maybe it'll be on
O'Reilly
.”

“Were you always this obsessed with cable news stations?”

“I'm not obsessed with them,” Bennis said. “I just think it's too bad, the damned show is being filmed in my own childhood home, and I didn't get a chance to see any of it. And don't tell me it's because I wouldn't go there. I wouldn't have had to go there. They go places and film things. Restaurants. Parties. I should have thrown a party for them.”

“I wouldn't have come.”

“Yes, you would have. I would have made you. But you should have realized it all along. Nobody ever really murders people like Sheila Dunham. They're too easy.”

Gregor looked like he wanted to break some furniture, but Bennis ignored it.

Then she got up, folded the paper, and said, “Time to check in on the situation with Sophie.”

Sophie Mgrdchian recovered better than anybody had expected her to, but she did not come back to Cavanaugh Street.

“We talked it over,” her niece Clarice said. “I've got no idea why she was fighting with my mother, and she either won't tell me, or she's forgotten. So we've decided she'll come live by me in Atlanta. If we
can get a good deal on the house, I know a very nice retirement community with waterfalls and peach trees.”

“Atlanta explains what I couldn't understand,” Gregor told Bennis as they headed toward the Ararat at six o'clock. “I knew there was a daughter, and I thought the daughter would be watching out for the mother. But, as it turns out, the daughter had taken a job in Georgia a couple of years ago. Not that she wasn't starting to get suspicious. She even had the police run out there a couple of times, but they didn't find anything.”

“And Karen—whatever her name was was already gone?”

“Susan Lee Parker,” Gregor said. “You should have seen the paper trail she had. A good fifteen arrests for fraud in ten states. Two incarcerations, one here in Pennsylvania for a scam she pulled in Altoona about twenty-five years ago. The other out in California. Where, by the way, they charged her with murder but couldn't make it stick. They never found a body.”

Bennis made a face. “There are probably going to be bodies strewn across the landscape,” she said. “You'll end up on
City Confidential
again, talking about serial killers.”

“Not
City Confidential
. They've already done an episode on Philadelphia. I don't think they do more than one on a place. But they'll get her for murder this time. They've got the body. Or part of it. She did a fair job with the lye, but it was only a fair job. She's getting old, I expect. It's all gotten too much for her.”

“Well,” Bennis said drily, “thank God for that. Tibor said they were going to have a memorial service for her at Holy Trinity—I don't remember when. I still say it was amazing that you knew there was going to be a body in the basement.”

“It wasn't amazing at all,” Gregor said. “Susan Lee Parker was a fairly run of the mill female serial killer. And con artist, of course. More of a con artist, a con artist first, maybe. I don't think she'd have killed anyone she didn't think she had to. But it's a well-established pattern. Male serial killers kill for sex. Female serial killers—with one or two exceptions—kill for money.”

“I still don't believe she fooled Sophie Mgrdchian into thinking she was Karen,” Bennis said. “I'm sorry, I find this a lot more confusing than you seem to.”

“I don't know that she did fool Sophie Mgrdchian into thinking she was Karen,” Gregor said. “The word from Sophie is that she was suspicious from the first, and that may be why she ended up on the foyer floor as soon as she did. That wasn't Susan Lee Parker's usual pattern. The idea was to worm her way into a house and then stay until she had all the money. She didn't have close to all the money when she knocked Sophie out.”

“Mmmm,” Bennis said.

“At any rate, she killed the real Karen Mgrdchian, but nobody else. I was wrong about Clarice being in the basement, too, because Clarice was off in Atlanta, and Marco Mgrdchian died a long time ago. No, that wasn't amazing. What you really ought to be asking is how I knew about Emma Ware.”

“Mmm,” Bennis said again.

They had been walking along at a steady but not very hurried pace. Gregor had not been paying attention. Now he looked up and realized that they had gone far past the Ararat. They were all the way at the other end of the neighborhood, in front of Sophie Mgrdchian's house.

“We missed our stop,” he said.

“Not exactly,” Bennis said. She reached into the pocket of her skirt and came up with a set of keys. “I've got the keys. I thought we'd go in and look around.”

“What for? You're not going to find more evidence than the police have picked up already.”

“I'm not looking for evidence,” Bennis said. “I'm being practical for once. This house is for sale. Clarice Mgrdchian wants a load of money for it, but I've got a load of money. It's the last whole house in the neighborhood that doesn't belong to somebody we don't want to move. So . . .”

“You want to buy a house,” Gregor said.

“We could throw dinner parties,” Bennis said, “or, you know, not.
Come on, Gregor. Let's go take a look. Maybe it was falling down on Sophie Mgrdchian's head, but maybe it wasn't, and maybe it would be easy enough to renovate. Then I can make a deal with Grace for my apartment, and she can have a place big enough to put a harpsichord in.”

“I thought she had a harpsichord.”

“She's got something call a virginal,” Bennis said. “Come on. All you have to do is look around. It won't kill you.”

Gregor didn't think it would kill him to look all the way through Sophie Mgrdchian's house, but he did think it might kill him to live with Bennis while she renovated it. In fact, he would not only have to live with Bennis. He would have to live with Bennis
and Donna
, because Donna would be part of fixing up any house Bennis decided to buy. Gregor had visions of upholstery fabric swatches and tile samples all over his kitchen, and then he followed Bennis through the foyer into Sophie Mgrdchian's oversized, high-ceilinged living room. There was too much furniture in it, and all of the furniture had little square lace things over the backs of it.

“So,” Bennis said, staring at the walls. “I thought you were going to tell me about Emma Ware.”

Gregor wanted to know why she was staring at the walls. Was she going to want to have them knocked down? Or painted pink? What?

“I didn't know her name was Emma Ware,” Gregor said. “I was fairly sure her name wasn't Emily Watson, because that was the name she gave the police. And she didn't have a record of any kind. Her fingerprints weren't on file. She was just a very young girl who wasn't saying anything to anybody but her lawyer.”

“Did she tell her lawyer who she was?”

“No,” Gregor said. “She didn't. But here's the thing. I knew that whatever was going on had to be about the deliberate attempt to murder this girl. That had to be what was going on, because that was what
happened. She wasn't a celebrity. She wasn't Sheila Dunham's daughter, Mallory. We did get in touch with Mallory eventually. She's older, she's married, and she won't talk to her mother if she can help it, but she isn't lying dead in a Pennsylvania morgue. So we had this young girl, and it didn't make sense that she was connected to one of the celebrities on the show, or even to one of the staff. She just wasn't—I don't know how to put it. She didn't look like she came from the city.”

“You mean she looked like a hick,” Bennis said.

“Something like that,” Gregor said. “At any rate, I thought that what made sense was to look into the backgrounds of the girls in the competition and find one who might have a reason to murder somebody. As it was, I might as well have saved myself the trouble, because Janice Ledbedder kept telling me why she had a reason to murder somebody. She talked about it all the time.
All the time
. To anybody who would listen, and to a lot of people who didn't want to. Janice had a long-time boyfriend. His name was Brian Ellendorf, but she never actually used his name. She never used anybody's names. I should have picked up on that.”

“Why would she use their names?” Bennis asked. She was drifting out of the living room into the dining room. “It's not like you would know who they were.”

“No,” Gregor said, “but it's her style of speaking. She usually does mention names. She just didn't when she was talking about this particular thing. Janice had a boyfriend, named Brian. They'd been going out together since junior high school, and then, right before the senior prom, Brian dumped Janice to take Emma. This was not a small thing to Janice. It humiliated the hell out of her. It especially humiliated the hell out of her because she'd always considered Emma sort of her protégé, the poor little plain girl that a girl like Janice takes on to make herself look good. I haven't had a chance to talk to Brian Ellendorf, but I'd be willing to bet anything that he had some sense that there was something wrong with Janice. Whatever the reason, he dumped the one girl and then took the other. And Janice started thinking of
ways she could get rid of Emma and not get caught at it. And that's when she got the invitation to audition for
America's Next Superstar,
and that gave her her chance.”

The dining room was a horror story. The furniture was so large and so heavy, Gregor thought it would sink the house. There were two display hutches, both with decorative plates behind their glass doors. There was a hanging light fixture that looked like it might come alive and bite somebody.

“That part still doesn't make sense to me,” Bennis said. “I mean, I get that they both sent in audition tapes, and Janice's was chosen and Emma's was not, but I still don't see how Janice got Emma to come all the way down here to do—well, what, exactly?”

“Get famous,” Gregor said. “By this time, Brian was no longer seeing Emma, and he wasn't back with Janice. So Janice was dumped and furious, and Emma was dumped and sad, and the letters came. And Janice convinced Emma to come down to the auditions with her and stage a stunt that would get them in the papers, and then they could use that to get themselves famous. The plot was ludicrous, but we're dealing with a couple of high school girls here. According to Janice's plan as she explained it to Emma, they'd both fire at Sheila Dunham, and then they'd get caught, and then they'd be in the papers. Janice had the whole thing worked out. They'd give false names. They'd pretend they didn't notice each other. It would look like the whole world was out to murder Sheila Dunham, and then they'd go on television and tell the world how they were really getting justice for all the rejected girls. It was all a lot of nonsense. A more sophisticated girl would have known it was nonsense. But it was a chance for Emma to get away from home, and she had a lot to get away from. I'd guess that she was also actually upset about not being asked in to audition. Janice had other things she could do with her life. Not many other things, and not anything spectacular, but she was on track to go to the local college and find another boyfriend and get a teaching certificate and find a guy and settle down. That's what people do in Marshall,
South Dakota, at least if you listen to Janice tell it. Emma was on track for nowhere. She had a good chance of ending up like her mother if she didn't do something with herself.”